I’ve never smoked cigarettes. Twice, in college, I thought it might be an interesting thing to try on, in the manner that one is constantly auditioning new habits around that age—mimicking the crowd around you and seeing what sticks—much like pulling on skinny jeans instead of bootcut or listening to a different kind of music or drinking espresso when you’ve only ever had milky, sweet coffee.
One poorly performed drag (a too-sharp inhale followed by an agonizing minute of doubled-over coughing on the tiny balcony outside my dorm room while my friend Peggy laughed so hard she almost fell over the railing) and my smoking career came to an abrupt end before it even began.
Thus, I can’t tell you what it feels like to crave a cigarette. But I, like any red-blooded human, am no stranger to cravings of various sorts and intensities, so the following lines by the poet Wendy Cope plucked, then amplified, some internal heart string, like a harp player hitting the exact right combination of notes to sound a chord that you didn’t even realize you were dying to hear.
There’s not a Shakespeare sonnet
Or a Beethoven quartet
That’s easier to like than you
Or harder to forget.
You think that sounds extravagant?
I haven’t finished yet —
I like you more than I would like
To have a cigarette.
What would it feel like to like someone like that? Not just to want to go out to dinner with them. Not just to want them to call you or hold your hand or curl up next to while you read funny bits of the newspaper out loud to each other.
No. More than that—to go through you day picturing their face. To be in constant conversation with them in your head. To want to inhabit someone in a way that doesn’t ever fully feel enough; to be deeply curious about every mundane detail of their life.
You wouldn’t want just want the broad strokes of their story, like what they do for work and where do they stop for coffee in the morning and did they go to summer camp. Not just the ordinary getting-to-know-you questions. Do they have siblings? Do they like fiction or books on history?
No, you’d want to absorb everything: What kind of sandwich did they eat for lunch in seventh grade and do they prefer kettle chips or ruffled ones alongside a club sandwich and who was their bunk mate at the aforementioned summer camp?
You wouldn’t just want to know how they take their coffee; you’d want to know if they always drink out of the same mug and whether they stack and tear two packets of raw sugar open at the same time and how they stir in the milk.
You’d want to know facts that would bore you about anyone else, but are suddenly captivating to you: In what order do they get dressed in the morning and what side of the couch do they like sitting on and when they take a run, do they stretch before or after? What do they sound like when they laugh really, really hard and do they prefer pears soft and ripe or a little firm and are they the wade-into-the-water type or the cannonball-right-in? What’s their favorite Rolling Stones song and which shirt in their closet is the softest? How did they learn how to cook an omelet and do they listen to music when they’re alone and do they write grocery lists when they shop or just wing it? What does their handwriting look like? Do they like to hike and how do they feel about broccoli and have they ever gotten a bee sting and what was the name of their second grade teacher?
You’d hunger for all the small details, because those are what add up to the living, breathing person before you.
Rare though that sort of desire may be, there’s probably a skill to be gleaned from it—a way in which we could apply that kind of curiosity to the world around us, including the everyday acquaintances and non-romantic relationships.
To be interesting, you should be practice being interested. Seek out people’s stories. Ask them about their lives. Take notice; be attentive.
Beyond the gift of your attention, there are other ways to connect and to intertwine your life with others.
Write letters. Write postcards! (Buy stamps. More than you think you need.) Send an unexpected package to someone. (For inspiration, this week I sent a friend a delicate gold necklace with the shape of her zodiac sign picked out in tiny sparkling beads; my older sister shipped six pints of Jeni’s ice cream to our little sister in Maine last month; and upon finding out that a colleague of mine loves the soon-to-be-discontinued chocolate flavor of Oreos, I found a few family-sized boxes online and had them mailed to her door with no card—secret-admirer-style.)
Or do something tangible closer to home. Do you live with someone who likes chocolate? (I hope so.) Do you have a neighbor? Has your UPS delivery man been visiting your doorstep more than twice a week?
In all of the above cases, I’d recommend baking cookies. Obviously, the ordinary sort would be fine, but let’s go above and beyond, shall we?
Today’s recipe is a chocolate chip cookie recipe, at face value, but it’s more than that. It uses brown butter and regular softened butter (the brown butter adds flavor, but I use regular butter too as the liquid has been cooked out of the brown butter, and you want some liquid to help develop some gluten in the flour and give structure to the cookie). It uses three kinds of chocolate: milkier chocolate chips, dark chocolate chips, and cacao nibs. Sorry but, you shouldn’t skip the nibs. They’re crunchy and bitter and fantastic. Buy some! It’s worth it! Buy a huge bag! Use them in everything from granola to ice cream!
The recipe also calls for brown sugar and granulated sugar—here’s why: sugar is hygroscopic, meaning it attracts and absorbs water. Brown sugar is more hygroscopic than white, so it’ll contribute more moisture to the final cookie, whereas granulated/white will make a crisper, crunchier cookie. Using both creates an ideal cookie that’s domed and chewy in the center with crisp edges that snap. Perfect.
You’ll use more vanilla than a regular chocolate chip cookie recipe. That…is for flavor. End of story. Do it.
You’ll sprinkle some salt on before baking. Salt balances the sugar. And it’s pretty. Do this also.
Furthermore, please use an ice cream scoop (or buy a cookie scoop) to shape them! Do this for all cookies, actually. It’s not just about aesthetics, although it does look nice. If you use a scoop for your dough balls, they’ll be uniform in size. This means they’ll bake at the same rate, and you’ll have consistent results without some cookies being too dry and overbaked and some being underdone.
You should make these for someone, or even for yourself, because that’s fine too. You’re worth it. (And if you do ever meet someone you crave more than you’d crave a theoretical cigarette, well, it’s probably worth hanging onto them and most certainly making them cookies.)
Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies
2 cups (240g) all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup (169g) unsalted butter, softened, divided
1 egg
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup (50g) granulated sugar
1 cup (213g) dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup (127g; 4 ounces) semisweet or milk chocolate chips
3/4 cup (127g; 4 ounces) dark chocolate chips
1/3 cup cacao nibs
flaky sea salt, for sprinkling
Whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt.
In a saucepan or skillet, melt 1/2 cup (1 stick) of the butter over medium-low heat, swirling constantly until the butter foams and begins to form browned solids on the bottom of the pan and smell fragrant and nutty. Immediately pour into a heatproof bowl and let cool for at least 10 minutes.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat together the remaining 1/4 cup softened butter, egg, egg yolks, and both sugars. Add the cooled browned butter and vanilla and beat well.
Add the dry ingredients, mixing until just combined, then fold in the chocolate and cacao nibs.
Chill the dough for at least 1 hour (or up to overnight). Once chilled, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Scoop the dough out using an ice cream scoop into golf ball-sized rounds onto a parchment-lined baking sheet, leaving a few inches between each as they’ll spread a bit.
Sprinkle flaky sea salt over the tops of the cookies and bake for about 10 minutes, or until slightly golden brown on the edges. As soon as you take them out of the oven, tap the pan firmly on top of the stove or counter to make the cookies “slump” a bit if they’re domed (you can also tap the tops of them firmly using the back of a spoon).
Let cool until firm enough to move, then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.